Xorg Memory Usage

October 20, 2007 on 4:09 pm | In Personal | By QBasicer |

I was just doing some distance calculations in Firefox, and it caused Xorg to use 60% of my free memory. That is, over 700MB of memory. My swap space usage went to 100%, and I had 12MB of 1024MB free physical memory. High memory usage seems to be quite common, but using Google Maps seems to cause Xorg to use lots of memory. I tried a Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, but my drive kept swapping. I eventually went to the Magic Sysreq combo to reboot. Xorg seems to use increasing amounts of memory. I’m not exactly sure the fix, but I’ve noted this problem for a while. I’ve noticed Firefox eats a lot of memory too (using 30% of my resources at the time of the reboot).

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  1. I’m currently running KDE 3.5.8, Firefox 3 Beta 1, and a bunch of other programs (including Amarok with the 24kish playlist). Also, transcoding avi -> dvd. (500ish MB RAM used, total)

    My quick test reveals that even when using Google Maps/Directions things work quite fine (no dramatic increase in memory usage). Firefox 3, Beta 1 is using just over 100 MB right now (and has been running for a couple of days). I also don’t use extensions.

    I’m wanting to call this an issue with the particular setup that you’re using.

    Slackware 12.0 + regular updates has always worked best for me.

    As always, your mileage may vary.

    Comment by Chris Gallant — December 1, 2007 #

  2. Depending on what I do, Xorg can end up using even over 250MB of virtual memory, even after I kill all my programs. I’m starting to experience a slowdown in execution time of programs starting up, and logging in, but I’m not sure what’s going on. I think, somehow, it’s my Gnome settings, because a brand new Gutsy account doesn’t seem to have a problem. I’m planning on moving to Gentoo in the future anyways.

    Comment by QBasicer — December 2, 2007 #

  3. I have the same problem. With firefox running in about 10 windows, Xorg memory usage exceeds 1GB, after killing firefox, it goes down to about 200MB.

    I am using Gentoo though :-)

    Comment by Jochen Riehm — February 4, 2008 #

  4. I just switched to Gentoo. I’m going to see how well it fairs. I haven’t done any comparison yet, but we’ll have to see.

    Comment by QBasicer — February 4, 2008 #

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